ODF to OpenXML conversion complete

Huge news to wrap up the week! The open source project for creating a translator between the ODF text format and the OpenXML wordprocessing format has announced the release of version 1.0 of the tool (http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=660889). Within the first 6 hours of the release they already have had 10,000 downloads.

This means you can now download the final version of the tool and open ODF documents in Microsoft Word. This really is going to be an important year for general document interoperability and choice in formats. You now have support for two international standards (OpenXML and ODF) in Microsoft Office, and I'm told that Novell is very close to releasing a version of OpenOffice that will support OpenXML (in addition to its current support for ODF). The OpenOffice release will be supported in both SuSe Linux and the Windows platform.

I also believe that the translator was tested against the test documents that the University of Central Florida set up as a test suite for ODF. You can see a summary of the ODF compatibility for the latest versions of OpenOffice and KOffice (http://testsuite.opendocumentfellowship.org/summary.html). It will be interesting to see how the translator running in Microsoft Word will fit into this. I'm sure at some point we'll see something similar done for the OpenXML formats as well.

congratulations on making this. You know I have criticised you in the past, but anyway, this is really a huge leap forward to interoperability. No longer will be children at our school locked away when they bring their openoffice documents from home to work at school. And they can freely choose whether MS Office or Open Office suits them (and their money, of course) better.

congratulations on making this. You know I have criticised you in the past, but anyway, this is really a huge leap forward to interoperability. No longer will be children at our school locked away when they bring their openoffice documents from home to work at school. And they can freely choose whether MS Office or Open Office suits them (and their money, of course) better.